A GIS-Based Investigation of Urban Youths' Daily Activity Settings in Chicago

Background and Purpose: This study described the daily activity settings of 300 urban youth who reside in high-risk neighborhoods in Chicago. Emerging research has focused on capturing the locations of urban youths’ activity settings and measuring the environmental characteristics surrounding those locations (e.g., crime, poverty). Yet less attention has been given to evaluating the social dimensions of these activity settings, such as location type (e.g., school), individuals present (e.g., friends, adults), level of adult supervision, and activities that occur within these settings (e.g., homework). Furthermore, no study has explored how these environmental and social characteristics differ among African American and Latino male and female youth. Thus, a more complete understanding of the range of daily contexts frequented by different populations of urban youth is needed.

Methods: Thirty high-risk neighborhoods (i.e., census tracts) were randomly selected from strata based on concentrated poverty (5 levels) and dominant race/ethnic group (i.e., African American and Latino). From each neighborhood, data were collected from ten randomly selected adolescents (5 boys and 5 girls) ages 14-17 (n=300) using a cross-sectional ecological survey. This survey asked youth to identify up to 10 locations visited during a typical week. For each location, youth were asked about its social attributes, including location type, individuals present, level of adult supervision, activities that occurred within each setting, and the amount of time spent at each location. A total of 900 locations were identified, with each youth providing approximately three locations on average.

The quantitative and qualitative cartography functions in ArcGis 10.2 were used to visualize youths’ activity settings in a two-dimensional map of Chicago. These maps incorporated color, size, and other cartographic symbolization strategies in ArcGIS to simultaneously display the environmental and social attributes of each activity setting. Maps were created by race/ethnicity and gender to visualize the distribution of activity settings for different populations of urban youth in Chicago.

Results: The activity settings of African American youth were surrounded by a higher number of annual violent crimes for a one-quarter mile radius (M=181.2, SD=120.3) compared to Latino youth (M=102.6, SD=67.1). However, the activity settings for African American and Latino youth were similar in terms of adult supervision, and indoor setting, such as a home, school, or friends or relative’s home. Furthermore, the activity settings of boys were surrounded by a higher number of annual violent crimes (M=151.43, SD=110.2) compared to girls (M=143.1, SD=105.8), with both groups’ activity settings similar in terms of adult supervision and indoor location.

Conclusions and Implications: The findings suggest that, while youths’ activity settings are located in areas with a higher number of violent crime incidents compared to the average number of annual violent crimes for a one-quarter mile radius across Chicago (M=81.3), youth still spend time in adult supervised, indoor settings. Future studies could examine whether the risk of spending time in a high-crime location is mitigated by an adult supervised, indoor setting. Research incorporating fine-grained assessments of adolescents’ activity settings are essential to accurately measure the risk associated with the urban youths’ activity settings.